[joshuaeckroth]

As a PhD student myself, I've realized that working through the program is only half "reading research papers and arriving at some unique insight," which you could say is self-teaching. The other half is presenting your ideas to your advisor, peers, faculty, etc. and handling significant criticism. This occurs in higher-level classes, as well, in which the feedback from the prof. is a very important part of the experience. That, of course, is not "self-teaching," far from it.

On a more general note, I think people should not make claims about what happens in situations (e.g. PhD programs) that one has not experienced herself. Claims like "whatever that person learned in college could have been learned outside college" is too often false simply because no one person can experience both sides of the debate.

[agentultra]

To be fair, the life of a PhD student is pretty well documented.

I don't think the first hand experience has much value except to the individual experiencing it.

As to the value of a PhD; it's a social construct afaik. It's value is in the reputation you build which is vetted by other PhDs and organizations, your dissertations and debates, by the body of work you publish, and so on. Take all of that away and you're left with just the knowledge which is pretty much available to anyone with half a brain and a spark of curiosity.

It's ludicrous to think that I should invest years of my life and more money than most people make in a year in order to learn how to develop an operating system. That knowledge is freely available and easily accessible. Computer vision? Check. Machine learning? Check. Statistics? Check. You don't go to university for a CS degree in order to learn how to program operating systems or figure out data structures. That would be an incredible waste of time and money.

Someone who is self-taught is simply self-taught. They may have decided that they don't need the rigors of a formal education. Perhaps they don't care about publishing papers and defending them against critics. However, there's no way to say quantatively that a self-taught programmer is better or worse than a formally educated one. It's purely a value statement and one I find is loaded with a lot of FUD.

[freshfunk]

I don't know. I found two Ph.D. students who's work ended up being pretty important for them... and the rest of the world:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/ http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/

[agentultra]

Well what do you know? We can start from there.

If you think I am implying the PhD's do not produce important work, I think you are mistaken.

[MrVitaliy]

I think this is similar to why Silicon Valley is so attractive as a start-up hub. You have seasoned VC's (instructors) and bright peers as your self (other students).

You can do it all by your self, it's just going to more time to find funding and partners. Something your competitors in SV would have an upper hand with.

[thezilch]

The second half of your experience can be had on github, launchpad, bitbucket, or project pages http://www.chromium.org/ or http://source.android.com/, where one can find advisors, peers, and faculty to rip your work a new one. As well, this translates nicely to the experience one might expect from a future workplace. Many of these projects have everything one would need to self-teach process, humility, and success:

* http://source.android.com/source/submit-patches.html

* http://source.android.com/source/life-of-a-patch.html

* http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html